Without even the pressure to dress up, you can listen with the leaders in UK poetry to the annual prestigious award ceremony for the T S Eliot prize – audio recordings now available here.
Thanks to the time machinery of your internet device, you are present to hear a master class in reading and presenting your own poetry. Each poet has 8 minutes to read their work. This is poets under pressure, reading to a roomful of experts in writing and performing poetry – with a leading prize of £25,000 at stake.
- Ian MacMillan introduces the shortlisted readings. (2 minutes 29 secs)
- (Second track, although this clearly happened before Ian spoke) Bill Herbert, Chair of this year’s judges, reads one of T S Eliot’s own poems – this year a particularly political one “The Difficulties of a Statesman” (5.16)
- Leontia Flynn (originally from Northern Ireland)
- James Sheard (good at explaining the personal starting point for the poems and engaging with the audience)
- Tara Bergin (originally from Ireland) reads from her collection based on the death of Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, who committed suicide after her lover married someone else
- Robert Minhinnick (Wales) reads from “Diary of the Last Man”. He edits “Poetry Wales” and writes with passion about the environment
- Roddy Lumsden reads from “So glad to be me”
- Jacqueline Saphra “All my mad mothers” – reads short poems with humour and insight about family and art and motherhood (her grownup kids in the audience)
- Ocean Vuong (Vietnam/America) reads with intenseness and drama of the fall of Saigon (his mother is Vietnamese/American) and a poem speaking to himself
- Douglas Dunn (Scotland) reads from his collection “The sound of a fly”
- Caroline Bird reads from her collection “In these days of Prohibition” – which Ian MacMillan describes as being about the surreallness of real life. 7 minutes into the reading, she reads a fantastic poem – which I’ve heard her perform, live – and it’s so vivid and funny, it’s like you join her in the scene
- Michael Symmons Roberts reads from his collection “Mancunia” – things to do with Manchester (an English city) are described as “Mancunian”
All in one place, we hear ten poets, current, contemporary, performing – selected by the poetry community as important at this moment in time. We hear different accents and varieties of ages and styles of poetry. It will forever be on these poets’ c.v.s that they were shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize. One will win. (The result is out now, but I’ll let you find it out for yourself. Can you guess who it is?)
The Poets talk about their work
If some of these readings made you interested to hear more of these poets and how they work at poetry, the T S Eliot Society has made brief video interviews with them on that theme. (Thank you, T S Eliot Society!)
Leontia Flynn talks about her work
Comma And 